Why do some societies exhibit more antisocial punishment than others? Martin explores both some literature on the subject, and his own experience living in a country where "punishment of cooperators" was fairly common.
A friend has spent the last three years hounding me about seed oils. Every time I thought I was safe, he’d wait a couple months and renew his attack:
“When are you going to write about seed oils?”
“Did you know that seed oils are why there’s so much {obesity, heart disease, diabetes, inflammation, cancer, dementia}?”
“Why did you write about {meth, the death penalty, consciousness, nukes, ethylene, abortion, AI, aliens, colonoscopies, Tunnel Man, Bourdieu, Assange} when you could have written about seed oils?”
“Isn’t it time to quit your silly navel-gazing and use your weird obsessive personality to make a dent in the world—by writing about seed oils?”
He’d often send screenshots of people reminding each other that Corn Oil is Murder and that it’s critical that we overturn our lives...
I suspect the word 'pre-prepared' is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here--when I see that item on the list I think things like pre-fried chicken, frozen burger patties, veggie pakora, veggies in a sauce for a stir-fry, stuff like that (like you'd find in a ready-made frozen meal). Not like, frozen peas.
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The ferrett.
Historically produce shopping was mostly in open-air markets, but in the US produce is now typically sold in buildings. Most open-air produce sales are probably at farmers markets, but these focus on the high end. I like that Boston's Haymarket more similar to the historical model: competing vendors selling conventional produce relatively cheaply.
It closes for the weekend at 7pm on Saturdays, and since food they don't sell by the end of the market is mostly going to waste they start discounting a lot. You can get very good deals, though you need to be cautious: what's left at the end is often past the end of it's human-edible life.
Today Lily was off at a scouting trip, and I asked Anna what she wanted to do. She remembered that a previous time Lily was...
Probabilities on summary events like this are mostly pretty pointless. You're throwing together a bunch of different questions, about which you have very different knowledge states (including how much and how often you should update about them).
"alignment researchers are found to score significantly higher in liberty (U=16035, p≈0)" This partly explains why so much of the alignment community doesn't support PauseAI!
"Liberty: Prioritizes individual freedom and autonomy, resisting excessive governmental control and supporting the right to personal wealth. Lower scores may be more accepting of government intervention, while higher scores champion personal freedom and autonomy..."
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eToqPAyB4GxDBrrrf/key-takeaways-from-our-ea-and-alignment-research-surveys...
A couple years ago, I had a great conversation at a research retreat about the cool things we could do if only we had safe, reliable amnesic drugs - i.e. drugs which would allow us to act more-or-less normally for some time, but not remember it at all later on. And then nothing came of that conversation, because as far as any of us knew such drugs were science fiction.
… so yesterday when I read Eric Neyman’s fun post My hour of memoryless lucidity, I was pretty surprised to learn that what sounded like a pretty ideal amnesic drug was used in routine surgery. A little googling suggested that the drug was probably a benzodiazepine (think valium). Which means it’s not only a great amnesic, it’s also apparently one...
I had heard, 15+ years ago (visiting neuroscience exhibits somewhere), about experiments involving people who, due to brain damage, can no longer form new memories. And Wiki agrees with what I remember hearing about some cases: that, although they couldn't remember any new events, if you had them practice a skill, they would get good at it, and on future occasions would remain good at it (despite not remembering having learned it). I'd heard that an exception was that they couldn't get good at Tetris.
Takeaway: "Memory" is not a uniform thing, a...
Meta: I'm writing this in the spirit of sharing negative results, even if they are uninteresting. I'll be brief. Thanks to Aaron Scher for lots of conversations on the topic.
Problem statement
You are given a sequence of 100 random digits. Your aim is to come up with a short prompt that causes an LLM to output this string of 100 digits verbatim.
To do so, you are allowed to fine-tune the model beforehand. There is a restriction, however, on the fine-tuning examples you may use: no example may contain more than 50 digits.
Results
I spent a few hours with GPT-3.5 and did not get a satisfactory solution. I found this problem harder than I initially expected it to be.
The question motivating this post's setup is: can you do precise steering...
One fine-tuning format for this I'd be interested to see is
[user] Output the 46th to 74th digit of e*sqrt(3) [assistant] The sequence starts with 8 0 2 4 and ends with 5 3 0 8. The sequence is 8 0 2 4 9 6 2 1 4 7 5 0 0 0 1 7 4 2 9 4 2 2 8 9 3 5 3 0 8
This on the hypothesis that it's bad at counting digits but good at continuing a known sequence until a recognized stop pattern (and the spaces between digits on the hypothesis that the tokenizer makes life harder than it needs to be here)
These are valid concerns! I presume that if "in the real timeline" there was a consortium of AGI CEOs who agreed to share costs on one run, and fiddled with their self-inserts, then they... would have coordinated more? (Or maybe they're trying to settle a bet on how the Singularity might counterfactually might have happened in the event of this or that person experiencing this or that coincidence? But in that case I don't think the self inserts would be allowed to say they're self inserts.)
Like why not re-roll the PRNG, to censor out the counterfactually s...